Word: deviled
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Maugham admirers had a right to expect that, with the maestro so well set and devil-may-care, his personal Notebook would be as breezy as, say, the Autobiography of Anthony Trollope (in which the old fox hunter posthumously appalled his huge public by admitting with a gay cackle that money had always been his muse). But where other note-makers have nailed their colors to the mast and let their hair down to the last soiled lovelock, urbane Maugham has preferred to soak his colors in bleach and pin his hair in a tight bun. His Notebook (the whittlings...
...castle," or was it "a Turkish Babel?" asked the wags. Or was it a mixture of "the Mosque of St. Athanase, in Egypt," plus "the temple of Apollinop-olis at Etfou?" Cincinnati citizens, who watched it abuilding in 1829 didn't know what the devil it was-except that it was to be named "Trollope's Bazaar" and to supply high-priced fancy goods and foreign culture. But "every rogue within cheating distance" was working on it for the nutty British owner, 49-year-old Mrs. Frances Trollope. They were selling her bricks at three times the market...
Creation, writes Barth, is grace. All created things are kept from a state of nothingness only by God. But the "whole realm we term evil-death, sin, the Devil and hell-is not God's creation, but rather what was excluded by God's creation, that to which God has said 'No.' And if there is a reality of evil, it can only be the reality of this excluded and repudiated thing, the reality behind God's back, which He passed over when He made the world and made it good." Thus, evil is nothingness...
...Missouri to Oregon, but with differences that the jaded reader of historical fiction will be quick to appreciate. In all the body-torturing, spirit-testing haul from Independence to the Willamette, there is not one Indian attack, not a single war whoop or flaming arrow, not one hot-blooded, devil-may-care hero to turn in an impossible rescue, not even a big-breasted heartbreaker in low-cut linsey woolsey to take strong nation-makers from their plain wives and set them at each others' throats...
...reconnoiter K2, the second largest mountain in the world. To their surprise they get 1000 feet from the top--and had to turn back because of a food shortage. A few years later a Harvard man and a Dartmouth man made headlines by rescuing a starving aviator from Devil's Tower, a fantastic-looking column jutting from the Wyoming desert. It seems that the flyer, who parachuted onto the tower on a bet, had imprudently neglected to make further plans...